You probably recall the surfaced video of Sen. Rand Paul supposing and/or implying that the majority of Americans on federal disability programs were "gaming the system."
To wit:
The thing is that all of these programs, there's always someone who's deserving, but everybody in this room knows somebody who's gaming the system. What I tell people is, if you look like me and you hop out of a truck, you shouldn't be getting a disability check. You know, over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club. (Laughter.) Who doesn't get up a little anxious for work every day or their back hurts. Everybody over 40 has a back pain.
We originally had a bit of fun with just the text of what Paul said, since it clearly suggests Rand Paul considers certain things to be Not Real medical conditions that nobody could possibly find debilitating—that he does not know the difference between "having a sore back" or "being anxious" and the most severe forms of either condition—but now the fact checkers have returned from their journey into Rand Paul's brain, or at least Rand Paul's campaign staff, and as is not uncommon the staff "explanation" of what Sen. Rand Paul was really saying makes everything
much, much worse.
[L]et’s turn to Paul’s specific statement — that “over half of the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts.” Where does that come from?
Paul spokesman Brian Darling pointed to two data points — 27.7 percent of disabled beneficiaries are diagnosed as having ailments related to “Musculoskeletal system and connective tissue” and that 14 percent have “mood disorders.” That adds up to 42 percent, he noted.
Which is still not "over half," but no matter—because if that is indeed where Rand Paul pulled his numbers of people who need to get over their aches and pains and "join the club," then Rand Paul is, to use the science-term for such things, even more of a jackass than observers had ever suspected. Why? Because the 27 percent of those on disabilities for "musculoskeletal" and "connective tissue" injuries does not mean those people simply have sore backs:
[T]he SSA definition for musculoskeletal category covers far more than back pain, such [as] amputations, all sorts of fractures, burns and spine disorders. So it’s a bit silly to assume that “back pain” is all of those cases.
So Rand Paul was
literally not making a distinction between people with recurrent back pain and people who have had both arms torn off by farm equipment, or worse. Somewhere, someone gave Rand Paul the statistic of "27 percent" of persons on disability having musculoskeletal injuries, and Rand Paul translated that in his own head to (1) each of them having ailments no more severe than back pain, which (2) makes them quite probably moochers. And that's the spokesman's best face on what Rand Paul said.
But there's even more to it, below the fold:
William Jarrett, an SSA spokesman, says that anxiety disorders is covered in the “other” category, not under “mood disorders.” The “other” category is just 3.8 percent of beneficiaries; Jarrett said there was no further breakdown. Under the SSA’s definition, anxiety-related disorders is more than just being “anxious for work,” as Paul put it, but includes “recurrent and intrusive recollections of a traumatic experience” and “recurrent severe panic attacks.”
So Rand Paul doesn't even have the right category on this one; "mood disorders" consist of illnesses like bipolar disorder and various forms of severe depression. Of the "anxiety" disorders that the (medically trained) Paul referred to, they are less than four percent, and do not refer to being "anxious for work" but debilitations akin to post traumatic stress disorder. (Note that both categories dismissed by Paul are, perhaps by coincidence, disabilities commonly associated in the public mind with returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. We will refrain from drawing conclusions on that, though it is ... odd.)
The Washington Post concludes that Rand Paul's statements were not truthful, but even that barely seems the point. Of more interest is how Rand Paul could possibly travel from those statistics to his own conclusion—that because "42 percent" of Americans on federal disability programs were in the same very broad categories as "back pain" would be in or that "anxiety" would be in, if he had gotten even that right, which he didn't, that it could roughly be translated into a general dismissal that "over half" of the program was devoted to people who are "either anxious or their back hurts." Which, in front of his audience, became his preferred and proffered evidence of the corruption of the system.
That's a bit more than dishonest. That's an internal translation in Rand Paul's own mind of amputees, post-traumatic stress sufferers, people with broken backs and people who have been badly burned in fires and all the rest into a generic lump of takers who can be casually dismissed as no more deserving of aid than people suffering from work anxiety or from morning back pains. No doubt any Rand Paul supporter worth their salt will immediately pipe up with of course he didn't mean that, but the thing is, he did. Let us presume the spokesman is correct and those statistics are where Rand Paul pulled his estimations from: You cannot get in your mind from there to the notion that "over half" of the people on disability programs are possibly "gaming the system" unless you take the statistics above and reduce them to exactly what Rand Paul said. You would be better off arguing that Rand Paul was simply lying, making things up wholesale, because if he actually knows what the statistics are and still said what he said, then he is a monster.
“It should be factored into any analysis that this was a spontaneous response to a question from a New Hampshire resident at an event — not prepared remarks,” Darling said. “Senator Paul never said that people who had back problems and mood disorders are not deserving of help. He never indicated that 50 percent of claims were fraudulent.”
First off, horseshit, and second off we all know that these were not prepared remarks. That is what makes them valuable. We are subjected by candidates to an unending stream of scripted events and carefully focus-grouped statements; we almost never get to hear off-the-cuff moments in which we can observe the inner gears of a politician's mind whirring and clicking in realtime to an unscripted conclusion. And from this moment, we know that Rand Paul has reduced in his mind "over half" of all Americans on disability programs to a handful of trivialized conditions, and that he is comfortable enough with his thinking that he sees no harm in sharing that thought out loud.
It's strongly reminiscent of Mitt Romney's famous taped assertion that "47 percent" of Americans were moochers that his candidacy could never win. He took the external conservative-peddled statistics of how many Americans were too poor to be required to pay federal income tax; he presumed in his mind that if they were not paying that specific tax, they must be moochers dependent on the welfare state; he dismissed the entire lot of them as being unworthy, and having something wrong with them, and as a group to be targeted rather than wooed. It may have been an off the cuff remark, but it showed the inner workings of a Romney mind unencumbered by the polish and glitter of his own enormously expensive and orchestrated campaign.
None of that is to say that Rand Paul's "over half" moment will end up being a tenth as consequential as the Mitt Romney remarks proved to be; that would imply that anyone is taking Rand Paul's presidential campaign seriously to begin with, which is overstating the case. But as a window into what Rand Paul really thinks, it delivers.